Weblog of Joshua W. Herring

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Monthly Archives: March 2012

An ocasional reader of John Scalzi’s blog, I headed over there today to find that the subtitle’s been changed to “It’s in the trees. It’s coming.” I’ll save you the trouble of clicking the link: Kate Bush’s 1986 single Hounds of Love – second track on the album of the same name – starts with…

Another interesting learning experience with the Tornado Web Framework today. It turns out that if you specify additional arguments to your receiver functions, they are required. In other words, if you do something like this: def get(self, arg): self.write(arg) in one of your handlers, your urls MUST take the form “/controller/argument”. There is no ignoring…

An old aphorism: “A man marries a woman thinking she won’t change, but she will; a woman marries a man thinking he will change, but he won’t.” Who can deny there’s truth to it? Beauty and the Beast plays with this slyly. On the surface, the man changes in response to the woman’s love, scratching…

I’ve recently swtiched to using the Tornado web server, and I’m a little in love with it. But today I hit a snag trying to get a backbone.js frontend working with it. Actually, I had a lot more trouble with the Backbone end than Tornado, but in any case, here’s the overview. Backbone, if you…

Check out Bill Maher’s tweet about last Tuesday’s primary: Toothless Tuesday too tight to tally! We’re gathered around the magic picture box with a bowl of grits watching the returns come in! Yup – not funny, just bigoted. Substitute “Watermelon” for “Toothless” and of course his career would be over, but Maher wouldn’t have those…

An interesting omission from the Commission on Presidential Debates’ transcript of the 28 October 1980 Reagan-Carter debate: Mr. Reagan’s famous “there you go again” line has been elided. I discovered this because I was getting frustrated trying to find context for it. It occurred to me at some point that while you frequently hear it…

Git is one of the more useful tools that I employ. But for all that I depend on it, I always feel that I don’t really understand it. I can make that feeling go away for about a week by reading Pro Git again (I’ve read it three times now), but then time passes and…

A very interesting article on the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies page by Daniel Eubanks (Is Intelligence Self-Limiting?) toys with the idea that intelligence may be self-limiting – in the following way: modifying the environment is not that much different from modifying the input signals from the environment, save that modifying input signals is…

Well, the timing couldn’t have been better, could it? My recent post complains that fixed conventions in web frameworks get in the way, and then Rails gets hacked. (More accurately, GitHub got hacked to demonstrate a flaw in Rails.) And how did the “hack” work (there’s some dispute it’s even a hack)? Why, by exploiting…

This one is so much worse than I remember it. I was actually kind of looking forward to this, because I remember it – somehow – as the moment when my probation period for Next Generation ended and I decided I like it. See, back when this show was originally on the air, I was…